Six Definitive Songs: The ultimate beginner’s guide to Terry Hall
No other artist spoke to working-class malcontent quite like the late Terry Hall, whose signature dead-eyed stare and restrained performance style captured the frustration and malaise felt by an entire generation. Against the grey, industrial backdrop of 1970s Coventry, Hall fronted the Specials as the ska revivalists burst onto the scene with songs rich in jaunty Jamaican rhythms but complete with scathing social commentary that came straight out of the punk playbook.
The music Hall made with The Specials sounded like a time capsule of Britain at its most broken, marked by a period of massive economic downturn and social disarray. Horace Panter once said that “discovering the Specials in Coventry was a little bit like discovering an armchair in your front room” because their style was so impacted so much by the cross-cultural makeup of their run-down city.
The band managed the tremendous feat of setting often quite dismal imagery to acutely danceable music – offering listeners a glimpse of hope that change was on the horizon no matter how bleak the reality. Don Letts once said their talent was “bringing people together in a time when politics was doing just the opposite”, which is precisely what their music did. The Specials bought rocksteady stylings to the masses, amplifying the voices of ska legends like Prince Buster and Dandy Livingstone, hand-delivering them to a whole new audience as they interpolated their material.
Hall is a criminally underrated force as a songwriter, and the songs he produced in both the Specials and Fun Boy Three had the ability to take issues like depression, teen pregnancy and racism and transform them into hard-hitting ska songs that have remained popular for decades after their release. Even when Hall took a backseat on vocals and songwriting, like on Encore’s ’10 Commandments’, his commitment to amplifying important political messages is what allowed activist Saffiyah Khan to address contemporary feminist issues on a platform she’d never had before. He will be remembered for his lifelong embrace of Caribbean culture and continued efforts to promote inclusivity and racial harmony.
Although he didn’t write every song on this list, it’s his disaffected delivery on vocals that transformed each one from lyrics on a page into generation-defining anthems. Those timeless classics carry his legacy, so we compiled a list of six that highlight his ingenuity as an artist and activist.
Terry Hall’s six definitive songs:
‘Gangsters’ (1979)
‘Gangsters’ was the Specials’ debut single, released in 1979. Recorded in Coventry’s Horizon Studios, it shot to number six in the UK charts and was the first hit record to come out of the independent 2 Tone Label Jerry Dammers had founded. Horace Panter wrote in Ska’d for Life: A Personal Journey with The Specials that the vocals on the iconic track blended two recordings of Hall’s voice. The first, he wrote, was an “angry” one that was later mixed with a second, “bored” version. ‘Gangsters’ struck the perfect balance between the pissed-off, downbeat vocals Hall was famous for and the imminently danceable two-tone tune.
Panter credits a lot of the tune to Dammers, who “overdubbed a treble-heavy piano” on the song because it was so bass-heavy. So heavy it had to be recut because “the bass blew the needle out of the record’s grooves”. A reimagining of Prince Buster’s 1964 hit ‘Al Capone’, not only did the Specials sample the car sounds and cries of “don’t call me scar face” that appear on the original, but they also changed the opening lyrics from “Al Capone’s guns don’t argue” to “Bernie Rhodes knows, don’t argue”, a thinly veiled barb at their ex-manager Bernard Rhodes.
The track also functioned as a dig at another British band (allegedly The Damned), who trashed a hotel room and stuck The Specials with the bill whilst they were on tour with The Clash in France. Hence the lyrics: “Can’t interrupt while I’m talking / Or they’ll confiscate all your guitars,” because the hotel threatened to keep their instruments unless they coughed up.
‘Concrete Jungle’ (The Specials, 1979)
All of the Specials’ music was inherently political, but the way they skewered the increasing racial violence they saw in Britain almost made ‘Concrete Jungle’ something of a protest anthem. Before her election in 1979, Margaret Thatcher had publicly lamented immigrants “swamping” English culture, which had given rise to an ugly wave of ignorant-and-proud-of-it nationalists. Groups like The National Front, in particular, were incredibly violent and would often turn up to ska gigs to start fights.
Hall echoes the incendiary tone of the group by opening the song with aggressive chants of: “You’re going home in a fucking ambulance/ you’re gonna get your fucking heads kicked in,” as glass shatters and Hall claps like a mad football hooligan. The song was written by Specials’ guitarist, Roddy Radiation, based on his experiences growing up in a Coventry council house. Still, Hall sings with such urgency that you believe it was him “being chased by the National Front”.
Given the political climate of the time, the way the Specials drew inspiration from the rhythm and blues backbeat popular amongst Jamaicans in the late 1960s was a radical act. But it was lambasting racism in songs set to that beat that made the band revolutionary.
‘A Message To You, Rudy’ (The Specials, 1979)
When the Specials covered Jamaican-born Dandy Livingstone’s 1967 ‘Rudy, A Message To You’, it became a fan favourite that captured them at their most upbeat, employing a traditional reggae rhythm of a straight 4/4 beat but combing it with a syncopated punk swing. Their take revitalised Livingstone’s lyrics, still addressing “Rudy” but telling him to: “Stop your messing around/ Better think of your future/ Time to straighten right out/ Creating problems in town”.
Rudy was shorthand for rude boy, which is described as a “Jamaican expression for a street hooligan, with more attitude than he knew what to do with” in Panter’s book. The rude boy was a sartorial, two-tone suit-clad figure walking the streets causing mischief, which marked the sense of self-reinvention that the Specials inspired in their young fans. Their iconic two-tone style was easy to replicate and gave fans a sense of belonging during a time of massive social upheaval.
Informed by the rich cultural makeup of the Midlands, with its diaspora population and white-working class – the genius of the song is the way it captured the commonplace nature of Jamaican patois in Coventry, galvanising the ordinariness and producing a hit.
Ghost Town (1981)
Although this single was written by founding member Dammers, it is the one most closely associated with Hall. The video sees the band cruising around an urban metropolis, packed shoulder to shoulder in their suits in the back of a Vauxhall Cresta. The misery of the empty surroundings is only slightly less stark than the look in Hall’s eyes as he pleads, “bands won’t play no more”.
The eerie, discordant notes and minimal lyrics are a nod to the crumbling infrastructure of Britain’s inner cities, amplified by the repeated insistence, “this town is coming like a ghost town”. It was released just in time to chime with rife youth unemployment and strikes, and the song resonated far beyond the Midlands. They vilified the government for ignoring the escalating violence seen in the summer of 1981, which resulted in riots in over 35 places in the UK (“Why must the youth fight against themselves? / Government leaving the youth on the shelf”).
Of the song, Hall once said: “When we recorded ‘Ghost Town’, we were talking about the riots in Bristol and Brixton. The fact that it became popular when it did was just a weird coincidence”. But it was no accident that ‘Ghost Town’ shot to number one when it did, simply because it was Hall’s dour lead vocal that made the song a seminal Specials anthem.
‘The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum’ (Fun Boy Three, 1982)
After the Specials managed to rack up seven consecutive hit singles between 1979 and 1981, flanked by Neville Staple and Lynval Golding, Hall left the band to form Fun Boy Three. ‘The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum’ opens their self-titled 1982 album and was originally intended to be recorded by the Specials, making it one of the last songs the band worked on before dissolving. You can hear the trademark ska stomp in the bass, but the song is far more subdued than the Specials’ more jaunty, danceable tracks because the focus was on percussion and keyboards.
Another jab at Margaret Thatcher, the song was a response to the relationship the Prime Minister had struck up with Ronald Reagan. Disgust laces Hall’s voice when he sings: “Go nuclear, the cowboy told us/ And who am I to disagree/ ‘Cos when the madman flips the switch/ The nuclear will go for me,” poking fun at Reagan’s stint as an actor in B-movie westerns before he got into politics. When Hall and Golding reunited for 2019’s Encore, they decided the song had enduring political relevance with Donald Trump and Theresa May in power and recovered a cover with the revamped title ‘The Lunatics’.
Hall told udiscovermusic he was “actually quite sad the songs from our first two albums are still so relevant. The first time round, we screamed about the injustices because we were kids, but now we’re trying to take a more mature view, though we’re still angry and we’re still trying to make people aware of what’s going on around them.”
‘The Life and Times (Of a Man Called Depression)’ (Encore, 2019)
Hall spoke extensively about his battles with mental health, but his frank account of the personal misery that followed him after being kidnapped by a paedophile ring when he was just 12 years old is perhaps best summed up on this record. “Don’t tell him it might never happen,” he sings, heartbreakingly. “Because you know what/ It probably already did.” Hall has always been chronically underestimated as a songwriter, but he shines on ‘The Life and Times (Of a Man Called Depression)’ by taking an unflinching look at his own unhappiness.
After years of self-medicating with booze and Valium, Hall later admitted he had been depressed for years. “But it was only 11 years ago that I was officially diagnosed,” he said. “I’ve hopefully turned a corner with it. But while you can look at the world and its problems, one of the best things about doing this is being able to communicate and also trying to help each other. Mental health is a really tough one because it’s a silent illness until it gets really bad, and it’s still not spoken about as much as it should be. But I’m lucky to be able to say something about it through music, so I felt it was important to express how I feel.”
Hall was often mischaracterised as moody and desolate, but the core message of the song is a hope that things can get better: “And when the sign says stop, that’s when I’ll go/ Like a clean, mean, medicated, fighting machine/ Who’s all dressed up and ready to disco”.
